James Forman Jr.

Biography

James Forman, Jr. graduated from Roosevelt High School in Atlanta, Brown University, and Yale Law School. He worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented juveniles and adults in felony and misdemeanor cases. He has also won the general non-fiction Pulitzer Prize for his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Read More >

Professor Forman loved being a public defender, but he quickly became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, in 2007, Maya Angelou School expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison. That school, which had long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff; the court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”

At Yale Law School, where has taught since 2011, Forman teaches Constitutional Law and a course called Race, Class, and Punishment. Last year he took his teaching behind prison walls, offering a seminar called Inside-Out Prison Exchange: Issues in Criminal Justice, which brought together, in the same classroom, 10 Yale Law students and 10 men incarcerated in a CT prison.

Professor Forman has written many law review articles, in addition to op-eds and essays for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Washington Post. His first book is the critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017) which explores how decisions made by black leaders, often with the best of intentions, contributed to disproportionately incarcerating black and brown people. A Washington Post bestseller, Locking Up Our Own was longlisted for the National Book Award and has been named a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Marshall Project, Publisher’s Weekly, and GQ Magazine. Reviewers have called the book “superb and shattering” (New York Times), “eloquent” and “sobering” (London Review of Books), and “moving, nuanced, and candid” (New York Review of Books). On Twitter, the New York Times book reviewer Jennifer Senior called Locking Up Our Own “the best book I’ve read this year.”

Professor Forman lives in New Haven with his wife Ify Nwokoye, a nurse practitioner and yoga instructor, and their 8-year old son Emeka, who loves sports, travel, and defying his parents. Read Less ^

Speech Topics

Locking Up Our Own: Crime & Punishment in Black America

How did the United States come to lock up more of its citizens than any other nation on earth? What can we do to change that? Locking Up Our Own is a book so compelling that it was named one of the New York Times’ Top 10 books of 2017, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and became an instant Washington Post bestseller. In his memorable keynote, Forman share his life journey as a child of a civil rights leader, a public defender, a founder of a charter school for incarcerated teens, and a law professor. He outlines America’s criminal justice crisis with both data and human stories. He leaves the audience inspired and armed with concrete ideas for how they themselves can contribute to change.

Ending the School to Prison Pipeline

Struggling for Racial Justice in Challenging Times

Testimonials

"James Forman, Jr. is an incredible speaker—his breathe of knowledge of the criminal justice system both past and present is quite deep. The evolution of the system from 200,000 prisoners in the 1970s to the current 2.2-million today is shocking but understandable when Professor Forman explains it. It is very easy to see how we dug this whole for ourselves in the U.S. and how we can dig our way out if we want to. Forman knows all the players in this tragic issue and he skillfully avoids demonizing any of them, which would be oh so easy to do. He’s an incredible dynamic and engaging speaker, at the end of the event there wasn’t an adult or student in the room who didn’t wish he was our teacher."

- International House

"James Forman, Jr. is a highly engaging speaker, combining hard data with moving and poignant anecdotes. I invited him to be the keynote speaker at a conference on children's rights and juvenile justice in January 2016. He was outstanding. "

- University of Virginia School of Law

"James Forman Jr. is an eloquent, engaging, and inspiring speaker. His remarks encourage both reflection and action."

- Program Director of the Teagle Foundation

"James Forman's convocation address at Macalester was thoroughly compelling: relaxed, lively, yet filled with matters of substance and seriousness. He speaks to the subjects of most importance in our times and does so in a way that is personal and persuasive. I would invite him back to speak again at Macalester in an instant."

- President of Macalester College

"James Forman's expert and profoundly humanistic presentation on the roots of racialized mass incarceration led his appreciative audience to a deeper understanding of the roots of the problem and what it will take to fix it."

- Western Michigan University

"Thank you! I was in attendance at the Westminster Town Hall Forum at which you spoke here in Minneapolis. I've been experiencing a great deal of frustration with our country's political "climate" now and have felt immobilized to make any impact, any difference at all. Your talk provided the motivation for me to take action. At age seventy, well into retirement, I was of the mind there was little I could do to effect a change. After exploring several of the options you suggested, I have registered to begin tutoring in the inner-city school system here."